Led by Fergus Tanner with Jamie Yost (guitar), bassist Olly Parker (bass) and Matt Price (drums), Drakes Island make a hybrid brand of folk, progressive and post-rock that balances existentially weighty soundscapes with a more tender vocal style. The result, as unlikely as it might sound, is something like the middle of a Venn diagram that puts the commercial folk rock of Bear’s Den and Mumford and Sons against the stark heaviness of early Wintersleep.
Only it’s not so much a Venn diagram as a continuum between two poles, and their debut release, Only Passing Through, pitches songs at various positions along the scale. The opening title track emerges from the silence with a portentous weight, the stirring guitar eventually swelling into a vivid sound, if not quite the post-rock wall-of-noise that might be expected. ‘4 Days’ owes a little more to folk, the drums and guitar keeping a fire burning below Tanner’s vocals, and rather than consuming them in some final conflagration inside the track maintains a brooding tone.
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After ‘The Hollow’, which leans as far as Drakes Island are willing into the mainstream folk-rock end of the spectrum, ‘Move So Still’ mixes ambient patience with a psychedelic groove. But it is on closer ‘Embers’ that the band truly lean into their weighty sound, expanding out past ten minutes with a desolate heaviness. The audience might be bigger for the accessible, emotional immediacy of folk rock, but that Tanner and co. are willing to embrace something slower and deeper is a testament to their ambition, and marks them as a band to watch moving forward.
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Only Passing Through is out now and you can get it from the Drakes Island Bandcamp page.